Chinese New Year – Year of the Reader!

by Jessica Elliott-Lawrence on 15 Feb 2015

The Year of the Goat has arrived! To celebrate Chinese New Year, we’ve created a zodiac themed board game for Year 1 students who have completed the Basic Code.

Reinforce camera words and practice decoding skills with this simple and easy to use resource.

Set up:

Divide your class into groups of four
Print and laminate one Year of the Reader Template for each group
You will need a token for each child as well as one die per group
Give each child one token to act as his or her playing piece
Have the children place their tokens on the ‘Start’ horse

NOTE: So that children do not get their playing pieces confused with each other, make sure that every child in each group has a different coloured token.

How to Play:

The aim of the game is to complete the entire zodiac cycle, beginning from the Year of the Horse and finishing on the Year of the Goat, visiting each zodiac animal along the way
The child must move around the board in a clockwise direction, moving from the outside to the centre and back again along the word columns, following the arrows the entire way
Have each player roll the die. The child with the highest number gets the first turn
Have the child roll the die and move the corresponding number of spaces following the arrows from the ‘Start’ horse
The child must read the word in the box that he or she lands on and identify if it is a camera word or not, in order to stay in that square
If the child reads or identifies the word incorrectly he or she must go back to their previous space/position
When the child lands in the middle square with the Get Reading Right logo, he or she must roll again. If the child rolls a six, he or she can automatically move to the next animal square on the board (the child must follow the same sequence – he or she must not skip more than one word column)
The fist child to reach the ‘Finish’ square with the Goat wins!

To change the difficulty of the game, simply download the blank Year of the Reader Template. To make the game easier, write single graphemes in the blank spaces, or make the game harder by using advanced word patterns.